Tinder and Semiotics

This past week I experienced an act of Providence: I stumbled on a Buzzfeed article that was surprisingly profound. The article focuses on “Tinder culture” and what causes us to “swipe.” I mention this because Tinder culture has become fairly ingrained in our colleges and universities and I found this article quite enlightening. A brief exploration of the Tinder app will help explain why it can be dangerous for dating.

Tinder is a dating/networking app that connects Facebook profiles, allowing you also to add pictures and basic information for others to view. From here you are given a choice: you can swipe left to create a “match” or swipe right if you don’t find the person attractive. The real question is what causes an individual to swipe left or right. I witnessed this deliberation this week while in a student government meeting. Someone sitting a few rows up from me was using the app, and he seemed to move through the profiles with little to no difficulty. Occasionally he would slow down and ponder what I’m guessing were the intricate details of this person and her irreplacability as a human being . . . but probably not.

So what causes us to swipe in a particular direction? Anne Peterson, a writer for Buzzfeed, argues that it’s semiotics:

“Semiotics” is, quite simply, the study of signs. The field of semiotics tries to figure out how we come up with symbols — even as simple as the word in front of you — that stand in for a larger concept. Why does the word “lake” mean that massive blue watery thing? Or how does the stop sign, even without the word “stop,” make everyone understand not to go forward?

To be clear, these signs are not static in their meanings. Their meanings are granted through context. Peterson describes how we would characterize someone wearing camouflage to be a hunter, a Southerner, or possibly in the military.

Peterson and I both have noticed the dangerous truth of this phenomenon: “that most of the fun of checking people out isn’t actually talking to them, but thinking about whether or not you’d talk to them and how.” The real difference between this app, approaching someone in real life, and an online dating site is that you can literally swipe potential matches out of your view. “Tindering thus mimics the relationship of checking someone out on the street, in the classroom, or on the subway, but with the added tactile pleasure of physically swiping the rejects out of your field of vision (and your life).”

Ultimately, I find this app to be fairly shallow and conceited. The main concern, however, is that it reduces possible relationships and dating to nothing more than what we can assume through “signs.” This has nothing to do with the person as an individual or as a member of a family—or certainly love. Sadly, marriage doesn’t seem to be the end game for Tinder.

In which case I ask, what is the point?